The invention relates generally to systems for maintaining price and inventory information regarding merchandise in a retail store, and relates particularly to systems for managing the space in the store to optimize several aspects of operation, including verification of item locations, confirmation of item adjacency relationships, and auditing of prices and product facings.
A number of factors have made retail store management more difficult in recent times, including narrowing profit margins, increasing expenses, increasing labor costs, unavailability of desired education and skill levels in employees, and the proliferation of retail brands and products within brands. Due to these and other factors, those managing retail stores, particularly grocery stores, have given much attention in recent years both to reducing the cost of fulfilling existing store practices, and to developing new store practices.
One known store practice is the "price audit". In the simplest case, a store that practices manual price auditing will have a list of expected prices, and on a particular day a store employee will be given a portion of the list. The employee is instructed to locate each item from the list in its actual store location, where the price will be checked. In a store where prices are marked on the goods, the marked prices are compared with the price on the list. In a store where prices are posted or displayed nearby to the goods, the posted or displayed price is compared with the list price. Despite the great labor cost involved, management at most large grocery chains will choose to perform manual price auditing on a more or less continuous basis. The management goal is typically that every price will have been audited at least as often as, say, once per year.
For many reasons, manual price auditing is less than perfect. It sometimes happens that a product is displayed in multiple store locations, for example, yet the person performing the audit will not necessary know to continue searching after one occurrence of an item has been found. Thus, second or third locations of an item may miss having the price audited. Also, on a given day the employee performing price auditing will have a list of items to check, and the sequence of items on the list will typically not match the physical arrangement of items on display, so that each item on the list requires a search for the physical item in the store.
Another known store practice is the establishment of "plan-o-grams". In a store that has established plan-o-grams, every section of shelving is memorialized, typically in pictorial form, regarding placement of each item of merchandise. Theoretically, nothing is left to chance in a store that has established plan-o-grams; there is a place for everything and everything is in its place.
As a practical matter, it is a ponderous task to establish plan-o-grams for a chain of retail stores. Each new product announcement by a manufacturer represents the prospect of having to update or change the plan-o-grams, as does the discontinuance of a product. At the level of an individual store, it is very easy for the physical store layout to deviate from the arrangement set forth in the plan-o-grams, whether due to inadvertence or otherwise. Furthermore, while most stocking is performed by store employees, some lines of goods are traditionally stocked by representatives of the manufacturers, who have a natural incentive to stock goods in such a way as to promote sales of, the goods of their employers. One variable that stores attempt to control is the number of "facings" of each product. A particular manufacturer would prefer, of course, that its products each enjoy a large number of facings, and that the products of its competitors have very few facings. Another variable is the shelf location. Every manufacturer would prefer that its goods be at eye level, yet not all the store shelves are at eye level. Yet another variable to be controlled is the adjacency of particular pairs of products or of product categories.
While the particular locations, facings, and adjacencies of goods within a store are all important, it is of even greater importance that store management be capable of ensuring that the store at least contains the goods that are desired to be present in the store. To that end, management will often maintain a "shelf set", a list of items that are expected or desired to be found in each store. While a manual audit could be performed to confirm that each item on the shelf set list is in a store, it is desirable that store management be able to identify exceptions in a routine, non-labor-intensive, automated way.
In addition to the identities of items of merchandise, the shelf set may also include information as to the desired number of facings for each item. It is very labor-intensive to confirm manually that for each item in a store, the actual number of facings matches the desired number. Thus it is highly desirable to provide an automated or nearly automated way to determine the extent to which actual facings correspond to desired facings.